Kukla's Korner Hockey

- Keep hearing that Kirk Muller will take on an assistant’s role with the St. Louis Blues and that Kevin Dineen is likely to be the next coach of the Carolina Hurricanes.

- If Adam Oates can’t find an NHL head coaching job, wouldn’t be surprised to see him end up on the Leafs coaching staff. Oates played with Brendan Shanahan in St. Louis.

- A quick Rick Nash update: He leads the Stanley Cup playoffs with 49 shots on goal and is last in the playoffs with no goals scored. In 24 career playoff games for the Rangers, he has 91 shots, one goal. And last I checked, he was third in the playoffs in Corsi. The Corsi leader was Nick Leddy in Chicago, who was made a healthy scratch the other day by coach Joel Quenneville.

On the other hand, Simmons’s sarcastic remarks about Corsi are as obnoxious and uniformed as ever. Corsi isn’t the stat that explains all of hockey, as no stat can, but taking it out of context with just two examples does not prove that Corsi is garbage. This is like using Jonathan Cheechoo as an example for why goals is a bad stat to measure offensive ability.

Having a higher Corsi than another player does not rank those two players, the same way that having a higher plus minus or goals or time on ice does not rank two players. It just means exactly what the stat means, which is that one player was on the ice for most shots for than shots against than the other player. This is usually a good thing, but doesn’t take into account linemates, opposing players, time of game, zone starts, quality of shots, etc etc.

If we look at Corsi this way, we can still call players with high Corsi that play against very weak competition poor NHL players, and we can call checking line players playing against top lines successful even if their Corsi isn’t that high. This explains why a player with high Corsi might be benched.

I’m not that big of a fan of Corsi either. But it helps to give numbers to things that we can generally see on the ice, or to have numbers to notice things that we wouldn’t normally notice. What if we didn’t keep track of assists? Of course, if you watch a player you can get a sense of how good of a passer or setup man he is but you would never say, let’s stop keeping track of assists.